Horror and Scary Story - The Session

The thought fluttered through her head, borne on a torrent of notes, as her mind drifted, her fingers left on autopilot. Her bow hopped and dragged across the fiddle’s strings, coaxing drones and triplets from the instrument; the fingers of her left hand flickered, fast as lightning, in rolls, cuts and trills. Beside her, Ciarán threw his head back and laughed, not out of malice or amusement, but simply from the sheer joy of playing; the local musicians smiled and nodded at him even as they played, racing through the second part and suddenly the tune ended. Shauna was caught on the hop; she was left playing on her own, frantically trying to find the keynote there. She dragged it out into a suitable finish, double stopping it for effect, and smiled shyly to gales of applause. Ciarán compressed his concertina; she rested her fiddle on her knee and sipped her water. The pub’s owner set a platter of sandwiches on the table in front of her.

“Oh you shouldn’t have.” she said, cursing her accent as ever.

“It’s all right, dear, we always do this when we have trad sessions.” the owner assured her in a thick Cork brogue. “Eat up quick, before that greedy lot get it.” Sure enough, the local musicians had dropped their flutes, fiddles and accordions and were ravaging the unfortunate sandwiches. “Ireland has the world’s highest sandwich mortality rate,” Ciarán used to joke about the Irish love affair with sandwiches. Luckily for the locals, at one in the morning, Shauna hadn’t much of an appetite.......